Saturday, October 30, 2004

Getting out of the Business

Getting out of the business

Well, I've been the person in our building collecting money for the electricity in the stairwell for about 9 months, and this month that comes to a close. All buildings are required to have a "vaad bayit" (building committee) which takes care of these things, but ours doesn't. All was going reasonably well, until I decided to heed the comments by my neighbors that the stairwell really needed a cleaning. I found someone to clean, and started collecting for that. Unfortunately that lead to a very nasty run in with one of the only residents that actually owns her apartment. Everything then fell apart. I may be able to collect exactly enough to pay off the cleaner (at the most I'll be out 50 shekels...about 12 dollars). I'll let someone else be the "freier**"(aka Sucker) for the building!

** For a good explanation of the term, go to This American Life and search the archives for "sucker". Act 3 is called "Suckers in the Promised Land"